site.btaBishop Isaac of Velbazhd Officiates Memorial Service for Victims of 1925 Bombing Attack at St Nedelya Cathedral

Bishop Isaac of Velbazhd Wednesday officiated a memorial service for the victims of the bombing attack at St Nedelya Cathedral in Sofia on April 16, 1925. He read out a speech by Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil.  Attending were lecturers from the University of Sofia's Faculty of Theology as well as many citizens.

This year, Bulgaria marks 100 years since the bombing attack at St Nedelya Cathedral, carried out by an extreme left group of the Bulgarian Communist Party during the funeral of General Konstantin Georgiev. The attack killed 134 people and injured some 500, part of whom later died from their injuries.

Bishop Isaac recalled that the attack killed over 130 generals, colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, soldiers, as well as ten women and eight children.

In his speech about the tragic event, Patriarch Daniil writes: “A sinister assassination was committed exactly a century ago in this holy house of God - in the cathedral of the bishops of Sofia, and today it continues to numb our hearts and to horrify our Christian and human conscience with the cruelty and inhumanity of its design. Every year we send up our prayers for the repose of the innocent victims of this grave crime and ask God for his mercy.”

The attack took place on the eve of the Resurrection of Christ, on Holy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper of the Lord with his holy apostles, the Patriarch recalls in his speech. In his words, the bombing of this Orthodox church is an example of the depth to which sin penetrates human nature and blurs the image of God in our minds.

“The audacious murder committed in this holy church of people from the state and military leadership of the Kingdom of Bulgaria, and along with them many innocent victims, including children from atheist circles, constitutes a grave sin and crime for which various explanations are possible, for which there is and can be no justification,” Patriarch Daniil says further in his speech.

The Dean of Sofia University's Faculty of Theology, Assoc. Prof. Ivaylo Naydenov, told BTA that this was a sinister attack, and he has looked at how many and what kind of attacks have been made in places of worship in the recent history of the world, and it turned out that the one at St Nedelya Cathedral is the most sinister. "It do not matter whether they are mosques, temples, synagogues; the problem is that when an attack is made in a place of worship, which is a place of peace and prayer, it has a completely different feeling and resonance, it breaks the already human peace - between God and Man, between men. And in this sense it is a cruel event that we must not forget," Assoc. Prof. Naydenov said.